“I used to have a bad record with soap, but now my slate is clean.”
Henry WhiteheadBorn 11 Nov 1904; died 8 May 1960 at age 55. John Henry Constantine Whitehead was a British mathematician who greatly influenced the development of homotopy theory (a special kind of mapping of topological spaces). Whitehead's work in differential geometry culminated in the paper “On the Covering of a Complete Space by the Geodesics Through a Point” (1935), containing pioneering contributions to this area of mathematics. He always retained his interest in geometry but soon focused on topology. He made substantial contributions to combinatorial homotopy and Stiefel manifolds and set up a school of topology at Oxford. |
